by Brian Fagan
Many landowners, while of course ignorant of genetics, tried to improve their cattle and sheep breeds, using the hard-won experience of earlier generations. Robert Bakewell of Dishley Grange, Lincolnshire, was one such experimenter, but one with a taste for self-promotion, who kept careful records of the genealogies of his beasts and selected individual breeding animals with the characteristics he wanted to preserve. He bred sheep with thick fleeces, strong cart horses from Dutch stock, and longhorned cattle that produced excellent beef but little milk. Many farmers visited his herds and copied his methods.
For all the interest in innovation, change came slowly, especially in areas where the soils were heavier. Capital to pay the weighty expenses of enclosure was short, farmers were conservative people, and even large estates were isolated from nearby markets. Nor could methods used successfully in one place necessarily be copied even a few kilometers away, where soil conditions were different. Nevertheless, the new methods gradually spread, thanks in large part to Arthur Young, one of the greatest English farming writers of the day.28 Not a farmer himself, Young trav eled widely and recorded his observations in a series of much-consulted books. While the French nobility had little concern with their landholdings except as a source of revenue, many of their British equivalents had a profound interest in farming. Young aimed his books at these gentlemen, arguing that additional food supplies required land enclosure to ensure the productive use of currently unused woodland, heath, and hill country as well as open fields and commons. He harshly criticized small farmers for their conservatism and ignorance, and for their neglect of land that could yield ample profits. Self-sufficient rural communities with their "lazy, thieving sort of people"-that is, subsistence farmers-were irrelevant in the new agricultural economy.
Inevitably, many small farmers were swallowed up in accelerating enclosure, this time not by mutual agreement but by private Acts of Parliament submitted by large landowners who had acquired the agreement of at least some of those living on the hectares to be enclosed.29 Between 1700 and 1760, 137,000 hectares were enclosed by parliamentary action, most of it after 1730, with even more being enclosed later in the century. The commons, unenclosed and unimproved pastureland, shrank rapidly in the face of a world where the feudal lord of the manor had long vanished and landowners and tenant farmers hired laborers to work their land. By the time enclosure was restrained by legislation in 1865, only about 4 percent of Britain's land was in common ownership.
The social cost of enclosure was enormous. The commons had once supported tens of thousands of rural poor in small villages, where they kept swine and cattle, "starved, tod-bellied runts neither fit for the dairy nor the yoke."30 Arthur Young quoted an example from Blofield, Norfolk, where 30 families of squatters maintained 23 cows, 18 horses, and sundry other animals on 16 hectares of a 280-hectare commons. Now that the commons had vanished, such people were forced to choose between living in extreme poverty in their home villages or migrating to the cities in search of manufacturing work. Thousands of descendants of subsistence farmers merely exchanged one form of precarious existence for another at the hands of wage-paying landlords and tenant farmers. Many landowners favored a high rate of unemployment because it ensured low agricultural wages. The rural poor became almost a separate form of human being: "the lower orders." When proposals came forward to allocate at least minimal land to agricultural laborers, the idea was considered too generous to the poor. In many parts of Britain, farm laborers' wages were at or below starvation level, even when wages in kind and free housing were factored in, and when other members of the household worked at crafts or gathered firewood for money. Few landlords took steps to replace their tenants' unhealthy hovels, which were devoid "of every improvement for economizing labour, food, and manure."31
By 1780, in Britain, unlike Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, or postrevolutionary France, few agricultural workers owned any land. Ninety percent of it was farmed by tenants, the main employers of casual labor. Farm laborers lived in extraordinary squalor. The journalist and reformer William Cobbett wrote in his Rural Rides (1830): "I never saw human wretchedness equal to this; no, not even among the free negroes of America."32 The living standard of the average English farm laborer in 1800 was worse than that of many modern-day Third World subsistence farmers. Filthy, clad in rags, barely surviving on a diet of bread, cheese, and water, the rural worker of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain was a far cry from the attractive, apple-cheeked villager so beloved of artists and greeting card companies. Writes Robert Trow-Smith: "What laughter and neatness and health there was in the countryside at this time were a triumph of suffering mankind over its circumstances." 33 Employment was at best seasonal, at planting and harvest time, and even that was much reduced with the development of the threshing machine.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain was no longer a rigidly hierarchical society with rights based on birth, but one where property ownership was all important. Society was more fluid, with intermarriage between landed gentry and urban money commonplace and upward mobility unremarkable. Landowners ceased to be a closed caste. This contrasted sharply with France, where a noble who engaged in commercial enterprises could lose aristocratic privileges, except when the activity was deemed in the national interest. In Britain, legal definitions of rank below the peerage were vanishing fast, and divisions between country and town becoming blurred. Still over half the population consisted of "the poor"-small shopkeepers, artisans, mechanics, laborers, soldiers and seamen, vagrants and beggars-who had inadequate cushions against the ravages of poor harvests or old age. They had to rely on charity or theft to stay alive and represented the most serious threat to law and order government faced.34
Intricate and still little understood feedback loops connected the diverse strands of the new agricultural economy, the deteriorating climate of the height of the Little Ice Age, and the economic and social conditions that preadapted Britain for the Industrial Revolution. Some connections are obvious, but there were also more subtle consequences. Back in 1664, a Somerset clergyman named Richard Eburne had advocated mass emigration of 16,000 people a year to the colonies as a solution to the growing number of surplus poor. A century later, Britain's population was far larger, land hunger was widespread and unemployment a growing problem. Increasing numbers of artisans and farm workers chose emigration as a way to a new life, a trickle that became a flood in the nineteenth century as the steamship and railroad provided mass transportation for the first time. Tens of thousands of farm workers emigrated to North America, to Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand during the nineteenth century, where hard work and land for the taking would make them farmers in their own right. The massive land clearance that resulted had a significant effect on the carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere and was a major factor in the global warming that began in the late-nineteenth century.
Not only does the land produce less, but it is less cultivated. In many places it is not worth while to cultivate it. Large proprietors tired of advancing to their peasants sums that never return, neglect the land which would require expensive improvements. The portion cultivated grows less and the desert expands.... How can we be surprised that the crops should fail with such half-starved husbandmen, or that the land should suffer and refuse to yield? The yearly produce no longer suffices for the year. As we approach 1789, Nature yields less and less.
-Jules Michelot
n a telling commentary on pre-industrial French agriculture, historian Fernand Braudel once compared the harvest scene in the fifteenthcentury Heures de Notre-Dame with Vincent Van Gogh's Harvester, painted in 1885. More than three centuries separate the two scenes, yet the harvesters use identical tools and hand gestures. Their techniques long predate even the fifteenth century. As Britain experienced its slow agricultural revolution, millions of King Louis XIV's subjects still lived in an agricultural world little changed from medieval times. Hippolyte Taine wrote of the French poor at the eve of the Revolution in 1789: "The peo
ple are like a man walking in a pond with water up to his mouth: the slightest dip in the ground, the slightest ripple, makes him lose his footing-he sinks and chokes."' His remarks apply with equal force to the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.
The remarkable transformation in English agriculture came during a century of changeable, often cool climate, interspersed with unexpected heat waves. As farms grew larger and more intensive cultivation spread over southern and central Britain, famine episodes gave way to periodic local food dearths, where more deaths came from infectious diseases due to malnutrition and poor sanitation than from hunger. Britain grew less vulnerable to cycles of climate-triggered crop failure, even during a century remarkable for its sudden climate swings. France, by contrast, where farming methods changed little, continued to suffer through repeated local famines during the century.
Wine harvests reflect the vagaries of seventeenth-century climate. These annual events were of all-consuming importance to those who lived from the grape or drank wines regularly. They provide at least general information on good and bad agricultural years over many generations.
The date of the wine harvest was always set by public proclamation, fixed by experts nominated by the community, and carefully calibrated with the ripeness of the harvest.2 For instance, on September 25, 1674, the nine "judges of the ripeness of the grape" at Montpellier in the south of France proclaimed that "The grapes are ripe enough and in some places even withering." They set the harvest "for tomorrow." In 1718, the harvest date everywhere was earlier, around September 12. Every year was different, and heavily dependent on the summer temperatures that surrounded the vines between budding and the completion of fruiting. The warmer and sunnier the growth period, the swifter and earlier the grapes reached maturity. If the summer was cool and cloudy, the harvest was later, sometimes by several weeks. Of course, other factors also intervened, as they do today. For example, producers of cheap wines had little concern for quality and tended to harvest as early as possible. Harvest dates can vary from variety to variety. High quality wines often benefited from deliberately late harvests, a risky but potentially profitable strategy widely practiced after the eighteenth century. Still, the main determinants were summer rainfall and temperature.
A generalized diagram of the time of wine harvests in southern Europe, 1599-1800, showing number of days after September I (bottom) and temperature curve (top). Data compiled from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine:A History of Climate since the Year 1000, translated by Barbara Bray (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971); and Christian Pfister, et al., "Documentary Evidence on Climate in Sixteenth-Century Central Europe," Climatic Change 43(l) (1999): 55-110
Generations of historians have mined meteorological records, ecclesiastical and municipal archives, and vineyard files to calculate the dates of wine harvests from modern times back to the sixteenth century. Le Roy Ladurie has calculated the dates of the wine harvest for the eastern half of France and Switzerland from 1480 to 1880. Christian Pfister and other Swiss and German historians are developing highly precise harvest records for areas to the east.3 Though incomplete, especially before 1700, these records are sufficient to show a telling pattern, especially when you compare these dates with the cereal harvests in the same years. Late wine harvests, from cold, wet summers, often coincided with poor cereal crops. Bountiful vintages and good harvests indicate warm, dry summers. Writes Ladurie: "Bacchus is an ample provider of climatic information. We owe him a libation."4
The wine harvests tell us that the seventeenth century was somewhat cool until 1609. The years 1617 to 1650 were unusually changeable, with a predominance of colder summers and relatively poor harvests. Such shifting climate patterns severely affected peoples' ability to feed themselves, especially if they were living from year to year, to the point that they were in danger of consuming their seed for the next planting in bad years. A cycle of poor harvests meant catastrophe and famine. France was coming under increasing climatic stress in the late seventeenth century. Unlike the Dutch and English, however, the French farmer was much slower to adapt.
France's rulers, like England's Tudors, were well aware of their country 's chronic food shortages. Nor were they short of advice as to what to do. At least 250 works on agriculture appeared in France during the sixteenth century (compared with only forty-one in the Low Countries and twenty in Britain), most of them aimed at increasing and diversifying agricultural production. Some developed ways of classifying soils and methods of treating them. Others advocated new crops like turnips, rice, cotton and sugarcane. Praising the humble turnip, one Claude Bigottier was even moved to verse:
But for all the literary activity, most of France remained at near-subsistence level.
There were pockets of innovation, especially in areas close to the Low Countries. Market gardeners on the Ile-de-France near Paris planted peas, beans, and other nitrogen-rich plants, which eventually eliminated the fallow. Elsewhere, specialized and highly profitable crops such as pastel and saffron were intensively cultivated. With the end of the religious wars in 1595, France entered a period of economic revival, no tably under King Henry IV, who did much to encourage agricultural experimentation and the widespread draining of wetlands to create new farmland. He was strongly influenced by the Calvinist Olivier de Serres's masterful Le theatre d 'agriculture, published in 1600, which described how a country estate should be run and suggested innovations such as selective cattle breeding, that would not be adopted for over 150 years.
Serres opposed the leasing of land to tenants, whom he considered unreliable and likely to diminish the land's value. He believed an owner should manage his own land and supervise the workers himself to ensure maximum profit. This would be good insurance against bad years and reduce the risk of famine and sedition. Serres also had much to say about labor relations. He believed in harmony on the farm. A landowner, the paterfamilias, should be industrious and diligent, provident and economical. He had an obligation to treat his workers and their families charitably and with respect, especially in times of famine or food shortages. He should have no illusions about wage laborers, who had to be kept at work constantly, as they were generally brutish and often hungry.
Although Serres's work was widely read during the seventeenth century, few people followed its recommendations. Most land was leased out to tenants and sharecroppers, who worked it with the help of their families and hired help. French agriculture was far from stagnant, but the indifference of many landowners and the social chasm between those of noble birth, the rich generally, and the poor made widespread reform a virtual impossibility. The chasm stemmed from historical circumstance and ancient feudal custom, from preconceived notions about labor, and from fear of the poor, who were thought to live "like beasts."
A huge stratum of subsistence farmers persisted into the eighteenth century, increasingly taxed and deprived of the use of common lands by an absent and uncaring nobility. Like their medieval predecessors, most of these farmers lived from harvest to harvest, at the mercy of the weather and a despotic government. The peasants' fear of starvation was regularly renewed. Subsistence crises were part of the political landscape, and bread riots were put down with brutal severity.
Louis XIV, the Roi Soleil, the Sun King, reigned over Europe's most powerful nation for seventy-two years, from 1643 to 1715, with a magnificence that became a near CUlt.6 He was an absolute monarch, symbol of his age, the epitome of the purest form of supreme kingship. "The State, it is I," he is said to have once proclaimed, and he seems to have believed it. Louis brooked no opposition, ruled without any form of central legislature, and used his talent for publicity to foster an illusion of perfect authority. His great palace at Versailles near Paris was the stage for dazzling spectacles meant to convey an image of near supernatural power. Royal balls, ballets, concerts, festivals, hunts and firework displays tied his nobles to his service and that of the state. "Self aggrandizement is the most worthy and agreeable of sovereigns' occupat
ions," the king wrote to the Marquis de Villars in 1688.7 Louis used it with great effect.
Louis XIV and his successors, Louis XV (reigned 1715-74) and XVI (1774-93), were intelligent men, but not rulers of initiative or innovative ideas. The byzantine intrigues of the king's closest associates militated against major economic and political reform. More resolute leaders than even the Sun King would have had trouble reforming a system that thrived on intrigue and privilege, especially when those with the king's ear had a vested interest in the status quo. In theory, the king's authority passed down to intendants, provincial officials who reported to the central government. The mechanisms of government were simple, but obfuscated by the inefficiency, vacillation, and lethargy of more than 50,000 venal and corrupt royal officials. Most of the nobility, the Second Estate, had little interest in farming except as a source of revenue, much of it acquired from ancient feudal rights, some of them as arcane as the right to display weather vanes or to gather acorns in forests.
Even had the nobility been closely involved, French agriculture was in trouble. Bread was a merciless tyrant that held producers, middlemen, transporters and consumers in economic slavery. For the most part, the French peasantry turned up their noses at potatoes and other new foods and relied on cereal crops and vines for survival-the cereals to eat, their grapes for some cash.
The king's ministers took a great interest in textiles and other manufactures, also in foreign trade, but they usually neglected agriculture. Their only concern was to prevent social disorder and stifle dissent with low bread prices, maintained, if necessary, by importing grain. At the same time, the king taxed his subjects heavily to support his vast expenditures and constant military campaigns. Between 1670 and 1700, Louis XIV waged almost continuous war on his neighbors, during years when the cooler, unpredictable weather caused frequent poor harvests and agricultural production declined.